Thank you, whoever you are, for being here and reading this. Ihave no idea why you might be investigating my doings,but, sincerely,thanks for checking in on me, unless I owe you money, in which case I'm dead.
If this isn't your first visit, you'll have noticed it's been quiet for several years.No updates, no podcasts - nothing. As you are here, perhaps in expectation of some new content, it is to you to whom I am accountable, and so to you I apologise for my silence.
After the completion of my story The Death of the Poet I could not function, creatively.
This statement is true: I wrote a sad novel, and was overcome by sadness.
It is truer still to say that, by the intensive manner of the imaginative process I used to produce that book, I think I did my minda mischief.Only now, after five years, does the subtlestwarmth amongthe ashes seem to suggest that the fire is not, as presumed, fully dead.
This has been a self-inflicted wound. We are used to writers abusing their characters, and I abused mine. However, I did so having first assumed their identities, using a sort of Method approach to eliminate my former self. I desired to feel the damage of theirtraumas, so that I could wring from it the last drops of authenticity. Presumably I thought myself psychically strong enough to experience full immersion and then pop back out of character again unscathed. Maybe an unconscious masochistic urge was having its way.I locked myself awayin a freezing, stone-walledhouse on the edge of the Massif Centralfor about ayear, with thecurtains drawn; just me.No TV, no radio. No visitors.Real life had no way to intrude; and so, by design,I was left to my violent imaginings, uninterrupted. I was not there. I was getting my face scaldedwith oil in California. I was trying to stay alive on the Western Front. The corpses of wine and beer bottles piled up, Often I'd wake up on the floor next to my writing desk, among the empties,unable to remember anything about the previous day, and when eventually I could stand I'd find that the last few pages on the laptop spoke to mania. A hot-eyed lunatic had taken over. Faulkner, O'Neill, Hemingway, Steinbeck.William Burroughs. I don't remember much of that time, but I remember acutely what it was to lose the love of my life, and grieve that person; I remember mourning some unseenperson whom I was driving ever-closer to death; I remember every hair on my bodystanding on end when the officers' whistles blew, and it was time to go over the top. I came to terms with the end of my life. (Recently I watched Sam Mendes' 1917, and the fear it struck in me was personal. I did my best to feel like I was there, and now, on some base level, feel like I was there.
I competently created a simulacrum of successfully built those experiences into my
I drove myself mad using repetitive techniques andI knew to stay in character, and took the lashings
Indeed, I intended to deeply wound myself, in order toMy methodology, quite deli
There's only so far I can flesh this out before it becomes ridiculous, so let me set out the position as follows:
I'm sorry about that. I'm afraid I had to take enough time, rather a long time, as it transpired, to recover from an injury, of sorts, brought about by an act of imagination.
My approach to writing has tended increasingly towards the immersive - getting into character and staying there, something like method acting. (I have no time for the Instagramming-yourself-sucking-a-pencil version of being a writer.) The objective is to eliminate any distancA
At this distance, I see how deranged that was. It was not meant to be sane. And the more I think on it, the more I realise that very few people will understand this, because how many have had any need, or desire, or opportunity, to engage this extensively with their own imaginations?
but I had committed myself to the most heightened form of imagining of which Iwas capable.
If by any chance you've read the resulting book - for which, thank you- you'll perhapsunderstand the darkness of the shadows the narrative cast on thewriter's mind. The trauma of the events I had made so real to myself did notdissolve when the book was published, I found myself unstable in both my character and my sense of self (I no longer knew who my real self was); authentically traumatised (albeit that the wound was self-inflicted), and still suffering nightmares long afterwards;to say nothing of ashamed, as I could not own any of these facsimilies of experiences, not yet could I rid myself of their potent after-effects. Perhaps worst of all, the feeling of being released from the narrative, and able to re-establish myself in real life, was so sweet that I developed a visceral aversion to any kindof imaginative enterprise at all, and so I found I couldn't write any more.Fantasies can hurt you, I'd learnt. Best stay well away. Even when I really set set out to imagine, my self-preservation instinct shut that shit down.
Please understand, I'm not looking for pity. Like everywriter, I know how feeble-spirited, pretentious or maladroit one's most considered sentences can appear, quoted out of context; pretty much anything written here would be enough to secure
